Right-wing billionaires gathered this week in Palm Beach to raise money to pay Donald Trump’s legal bills and fund his third presidential campaign.
Special guests of ‘honor’ included the architects of the ‘family separation policy’; a program which the drug-addled septuagenarian promised to bring back in his second term.
The Mar-a-Lago ballroom and John Paulson’s mansion were filled with a who’s who of right-wing sexual predators and tax cheats.
Men who had made it their business to try and dismantle labor unions and social safety nets.
Not just merely greedy business men who want to get out of paying their fair share in taxes.
These are extremists looking to reshape our republic to suit their twisted desires.
I was staying in a hotel a little south of Trump’s redoubt on the ocean last week and noticed something very peculiar going on at my hotel.
It seemed another group had gathered for a week’s training in preparation for something related to MAGA.
They were paramilitary/militia types replete with all the tattoos and toxic iconography of the modern right-wing male.
Think black and white American flag t-shirts and AR-15 logos.
The skulls and screaming eagle demographic; which if you have spent any time in places like Florida you will be all too familiar with these days.
The human equivalent of a Ford-150 - too much horsepower and too little control - a vehicle designed for brute force that manufactures its own danger.
They had the demeanor and discipline of ex-military ‘special forces’ types.
After a day of off-site prepping (which I am assuming for the purposes of this article was for the Trump 2024 election, based on bits of conversations I could surreptitiously glean from observing them in the hotel’s many public areas and elevators), they could be seen working out in the hotel gym late into the night.
Whatever they were preparing themselves for - they were obviously getting paid and taking it very seriously.
An imposing bunch and that seemed to be the point.
The group was not a fan of my pink shorts and long hair; several of my spy missions had to be quickly aborted when one or two of the men seemingly noticed and gave me the stink eye.
If there’s a look to a liberal, I definitely have it and was not greeted warmly.
The Republican mission for the 2024 election has already been stated publicly as an attempt to intimidate Democrats at the polls and suppress voter turnout outright.
We can see that clearly from the laws individual states are imposing to try and limit how many minority voters are able to make it to the polls; and to try and gerrymander their way out of the urban areas that have traditionally leaned heavily Democratic.
There is perhaps another very well-funded and meticulously organized quasi-paramilitary operation taking place somewhat quietly right under our noses.
They may be gathering and training in plain sight for something the likes of which this country has not seen before - and which could potentially be so disruptive to the electoral process that in the midst of a constitutional crisis Trump could claim power.
Which I fully believe Trump plans to do early on election night regardless of the outcome.
“I won, Biden is trying to steal the election, take to the streets and fight for MAGA”.
It is not hard to imagine Trump saying something of the sort, as he has said something similar basically everyday for the last three years.
The right-wing ecosphere has built an entire industry on this sort of aggrievement - it should come as no surprise that they are able to recruit ‘soldiers’ in their delusional definition of ‘fighting for freedom’.
These are not the sloppy ‘Gravy Seals’-types who skipped the day shift at Fuddruckers to march with their obese orange godhead to the U.S. Capitol and hang his Vice President to stop the electoral certification.
These are the much more organized and well-armed militia types that were waiting just across the river from D.C. to carry out their mission.
The attempted coup failed; Trump wasn’t able to declare martial law and set these forces in motion to the full extent of their plans on that cold day in January - but we have no reason to believe they will not make another plan this time around and do all they can to carry it out.
As I wrote recently, they have seemingly found their ‘battle rhythm’ - this should be of great concern.
We came perilously close to the unthinkable on January 6th but there are many who still believe it could not happen here.
That the U.S. government and law enforcement would not allow it.
I would contend those positions would be wrong if they discount the level MAGA has already infiltrated military leadership and our institutions.
We would be foolish not to game out potential scenarios.
Men like Mike Flynn did not go away; they are very much involved in an attempt to help Trump turn the USA into an ‘illiberal democracy’ based on recent examples in Europe, most prominently, Hungary.
It is no accident that Viktor Orban met recently with Trump at Mar-a-Lago and left with a promise from Donald to withdraw U.S. support for Ukraine and allow Putin to expand further into Europe.
A nightmare scenario in any context: Putin has the blessing of the most corrupt and criminal man to ever hold office in the United States of America.
These efforts are being buttressed by an avalanche of cash, not merely pouring into Trump’s campaign coffers but into the various groups backing him in an effort to dismantle the administrative state.
The goal is to return this country to a pre-New Deal era.
An every-man-for-himself type economy that benefits those at the top the most.
It is no coincidence that one of the promises that Trump made to his room of billionaires at Mar-a-Lago was to cut Social Security and Medicare and give a huge tax cut to the wealthiest one percent.
In Trump’s last term in office his tax cuts for the rich contributed $1.9 trillion to our national debt.
Trump had fully tanked our economy by the end of his term - becoming one of only two presidents to preside over net job losses.
The other being Herbert Hoover whose awful economic stewardship was a fundamental reason FDR had to create the New Deal in the first place.
Democratic social safety programs saved the day for many Americans and helped pull this country out of the Great Depression.
Our involvement in World War Two was the other event that helped build our nation into the super power it became in the twentieth century - both economically and militarily.
And it came after an era of isolation and appeasement for fascism both homegrown and foreign.
We now have a presidential candidate who promises to repeat these awful moves and is being encouraged and funded by billionaires bent on destroying democracy.
Their aim is to return us to our worst instincts and attributes: greed, violence, xenophobia and racism - and create an ethnonationalist state led by a madman who makes no secret of his desire to become a dictator.
Being cheered on by people too ignorant and culturally malnourished to realize the dangers they are facing.
The rank and file MAGA will be fed into the meat grinder by the very folks they are supporting.
They are no match for Federalist Society co-chair Leonard Leo’s new non-profit, Marble Freedom Trust, which received $1.6 billion by right-wing billionaire Barry Seid in 2021 alone, in direct response to Trump’s failed coup.
The message was clear: ‘next time, make sure it works…’
A small group of billionaires want to make sure they get a payout for the enormous amounts of cash they are pouring into the Christofascist movement aligned with Trump.
They are hoping voter intimidation and outright interference will tip the electoral college in Trump’s favor this time and are leaving nothing to chance.
If they succeed it will mean game over for democracy - and GOP ‘think tank’ D.C. is all for it.
It is not only the Heritage Foundation-types and their ‘Project 2025’ we need to fear in these efforts.
There are also Republican politicians clustered on ‘Patriots Row,’ a block of townhouses on Capitol Hill where many of them live and from which they exert an extreme Christofascist dogma on the rest of the GOP.
Their most prominent member being Mark Meadows - who received a million dollars from Donald Trump’s ‘Save America PAC’ weeks after the House opened their investigation into the events of January 6th, 2021.
Meadows himself played a direct role in those days as Trump’s feckless Chief of Staff who hurriedly burned documents in the White House fireplace to cover his boss’s tracks concerning the efforts around their attempts to overturn the 2020 election.
He is clearly all-in on the MAGA agenda and hopes to make it happen again: he is not alone.
The billionaires backing this agenda have turned on the cash spigots and are very clear in what their aims are - and they obviously have allies in our government and institutions going all the way up to the Supreme Court.
There are several scenarios in which they could succeed in getting Trump re-elected and they are pumping resources into them all of them, including potentially the use of militias and violent intimidation to achieve and implement their goal.
A redux of Trump’s call to the Proud Boys in 2020 to ‘Stand back and stand by-’.
Ginni Thomas is also someone on the inside of conservative Washington who played an outsized role in organizing the events of January 6th, 2021.
Ever wonder what she has been up to these days? Think her long term association with Leonard Leo is escaping the largess that is flowing into these organizations?
My guess is right now she is playing an integral part in their plan for the 2024 election - and I am sure Clarence Thomas will be there for the movement if and when he is needed.
Bad men and women can achieve all sorts of awful things.
When they are well-armed and well-funded they can pose a grave threat to our democracy - especially when they have been brain-washed into believing they themselves are the real patriots protecting democracy.
Of course they are not: they are protecting criminals, scoundrels and people who have been given every material blessing but only want to steal more from the people who have the least.
Folks not interested in protecting a society but tearing it down in favor of their misogynistic and race-based dogma designed to protect white mediocrity and generational wealth.
Trump’s MAGA rallies have recently veered into the messianic - this is a further sign they would be willing to manipulate the base into doing all kinds of awful things in the name of the leader.
A new kind of holy war, lead and prosecuted on behalf of one of the most unholiest men this country has ever produced; a man so execrable on a soul level that dogs bark in his presence.
My suspicions and my warning based on what I observed in Florida, which is ground zero for many of the foot soldiers in this movement, is that they are planning something big.
This won’t just be a few whack jobs protesting outside of a polling place in Arizona or a bunch of Cheeseheads in Wisconsin drawing up fake electoral ballots.
An effort, by the way, that was led directly out of the Trump White House and partially overseen by Jared Kushner, who literally set up a telemarketing operation in the days after the election to reach Republican electors and persuade them to ignore the will of the people.
Flying some of the electors to D.C. to be cajoled directly by Trump himself with full compliance within the RNC.
If they are in fact planning something it will be much bigger and potentially more violent than anything we have witnessed in the last go round.
If they succeed, there will not be much we can do about it in the initial shockwaves, as Trump will attempt to seize power very quickly on election night.
I am not suggesting there will not be tremendous resistance and a fight from the left but I am saying it will be a lot easier if we can figure out what is happening before it happens.
We also may not be able to count on our institutions and law enforcement to investigate or offer rebuke.
The FBI still has not found who left pipe bombs outside the DNC on the eve of January 6th (my money is on MTG).
The courts have yet to hold Trump fully accountable for his myriad crimes during and after his time in office, including the theft of classified documents that held nuclear secrets.
Judge Aileen Cannon has clearly fallen under Trump’s sway, doing all she can to help him evade justice.
A Special Prosecutor who is doing all he can to make up for lost time after AG Garland dragged his feet for years before investigating Trump, seemingly hoping he would just go away rather than hold him accountable.
Time is not on our side but there is still enough of it to try and stop Trump and figure out what the plan is for the GOP.
As my old boss Stephen Stills used to sing, ‘There’s something happening here…’.
We would do well to figure it out now.
Vote Blue.
I read an interesting article a couple of years ago that posited the reason the US is the way it is, is a result of the American revolution. It compared US society to that of the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, where democracies had evolved more gradually. Yes, England had its own revolution in the 17th century and got rid of its king. However, after a few years decided it wasn't such a good idea and got rid of the Republic.
By and large there is a huge distrust of in the US of its own government, which is not the case in the above mentioned countries, or at least not to the same extent. And "Freedom" Trumps everything (pun not intended)
It also strikes me that a mandatory voting system would eliminate so many problems with US elections. But can you imagine the outcry if that were even suggested?
I admire your stamina. You are the gift that keeps on giving and I appreciate your shake up calls. Thanks!